We don’t make stuff any more – the Chinese do it for us. What’s the upshot? Clean rivers in Britain’s cities. Overlooked and unloved, they are cheap and offer some of the best fishing in the land. Fill your boots!

Suggest an urban river you know. It must be cheap and in the British Isles.

“You could fish the other river”
“Which one?” I enquire.
“The other river”
“Which other one?!”
I’m on the line to Rory’s Fishing Tackle, Temple Bar, Dublin. The speaker is Rory himself, and he’s getting as exasperated with my blockheaded English monkey business as I’m getting tired of his cheeky Irish sense of humour. Moments before, I had secured a four-day job in Dublin, Thursday Friday, and Monday Tuesday, which would mean waiting in Dublin for the weekend. The moment these jobs arrive, in a good fishing country, with time off, I have to check where my travel fly rod is. Of course I know where it is, but I still have to actually go to it, like some people check for their car keys on their approach to their car. I sometimes even get it out and count the pieces to check they’re all there. The next process is to get some local information from fishing books, and then put in a call. And this is where the wheels have come off.

I ask Rory if there’s somewhere cheap in central Dublin where I can fish for trout in moving water. ‘Th’ is pronounced ‘d’ in Ireland and so I assume that he is saying ‘the other river’ when he is telling me I should fish The Dodder River. This confusion aside, he assures me it flows into the Liffey in the very centre of town, is full of trout to a pound, and costs buttons to fish. Now this is news.

Saturday comes, I’m up early and down at Rory’s getting a permit. Which he produces instantly. It is €11. Now I don’t really consider €11 to be buttons for a day permit, but it isn’t steep for a good place, either. I just think it’s a bit cheeky to put forward that it’s a really cheap place at that price. I ask Rory for two of them. Rory wants to know what the name is for Dodder permit. I say Quinn also. He asks if I’m taking the wife. No, they’re both for me, Saturday and Sunday. Rory stops, slows right down, realising he’s dealing with an out-and-out cretin.
“Do you see where it says SEASON TICKET, do you?”
“!”
I’d be very interested to hear from anyone who is paying less for a season ticket. This is less than £7.

Back at the Gresham Hotel, I visit the concierge. It’s a posh hotel my grandfather used to think was, to use a phrase he borrowed from James Joyce; ‘The very it’. I ask the concierge for a map of Dublin, he gets out this cartoon drawing version which only has the very centre on it. No, I need a proper street atlas to see where The Dodder River is.
“Which one?” Comes the predictable reply. I explain myself at length until it becomes clear that the concierge has no map of Dublin, doesn’t know where the river is, has no access to the internet and doesn’t call cabs for people. I edge back away from him, wondering what it is he does all day at the desk of a four star hotel, apart from dodging tips by being amazingly, preternaturally incompetent.

Cabbie hailed, I tell him, “Do you know The Dodder River?”
“Which one, though but?” He asks.
“It’s a river, its name is Dodder.”
“No. Not in Dublin”.
Here, luckily, being a London boy I remember that Rory said The Dodder flows into the Liffey right in the centre of Dublin, at Camden Lock, though he also said the lower reaches are largely ignored, though they have sea trout.
“Camden Lock, please.”
The cabbie duly takes me to Camden Lock, and when we arrive, along Bridge Road, which is actually named for a high bridge over The Dodder, the cabbie looks down at the river as if it had been installed since yesterday. We are still in the heart of Dublin.
“Forty years in Dublin and I’ve never seen that. The Dodder: Well!”. He fixes me with a strong look. “Your mother and father made love and you were created, and in that moment Jesus Christ gave you a soul, always remember that”. Time to hit the river.

You may catch sea trout in the lower reaches of The Dodder, and you’d be wise for that reason to use a stout leader, because I suspect you’re more likely to hook a shopping trolley, and the likeliest thing you’ll catch might be typhoid, or diphtheria. There’s plenty of street life, graffiti, empty tinnies and used condoms, whatever the cabbie thinks of that… It is tidal, it smells pretty bad, and access is very poor. Heading upstream, it soon starts to flow, and as soon as it does, it looks like trout.

It’s a good two or three miles to Herbert Park, and it’s upstream of here that The Dodder comes into its own. The water quality is obviously better. And by framing your photos carefully, you could pretend you went and fished a wild river. There is some litter, and the odd discarded bicycle, but no washing machines or traffic cones. And there are trout in huge numbers. They are free rising and also take the nymph very well. Having covered a huge amount of ground to get to the fishable section of The Dodder, I kept the pace up. Considering it’s just a little stream, there is an incredible variety of water here. There’s a very still flow through a golf course, lots of riffled pools, and very fast runs, there is a section that has been cut like a canal which is very still and in which I could only spook fish, not catch them. The only other fishers were kids with bait. It’s tough for them because it’s really a fly water. I reached a tributary above which both The Dodder and the tributary were just trickles. This is the very edge of Dublin. I started thinking about getting on a bus back into town in my waders, something I hate doing, but I was 10 miles from the centre.

I had a few last casts. This kid came past. Any good? I told him I’d done all right, six or seven fish, a couple near the pound mark. He didn’t believe me when I couldn’t produce them. I was already weird to be ‘floy fishin’ as they call it in Dublin.
“Well, I started early, I’ve come up all the way from The Liffey” I told him wearily.
“Da Liffey?!” He shouted, like I was certifiable, and he made a getaway, fearing that stranger-danger might be moving to a new level with the mad Englishman.

I got on the bus, gave the people of Dublin some laughs as they headed out in their glad rags for Saturday night. I got back to the hotel, sat in front of the telly in the bar, a rare Leeds United match was playing on the box. I ordered up a bottle of wine and a bite to eat. The guy behind the bar served it to me at the table. Not a Leeds fan, but sympathetic to pain. He asked me what I’d been up to. I told him. But I wasn’t going to fall into the old trap.
“I went fishing on The Dodder, it’s a river, flows through south Dub…”
“Sure you don’t have to tell me where The Dodder is. I’m from Dublin”.

Footnote: Not only is the Dodder a lovely little trout stream, full of fish, and an interesting meander through Dublin, it is very well maintained. Included in the €11, is a pamphlet inviting every angler to the AGM and raffle, giving information about hatches and flies, record catches, environmental action, trophies and the like. I can’t tell you how jealous I am of Dubliners and their beautifully run, secret river.

Price: €11 a season, including international postage of the pamphlet. Incredible.
Price/quality ratio: Optimum.
Quality: 7/10
Chavtastic: Yes, but without being at all threatening.
Debris: Every manner of shite in the lower reaches, thinning out upstream, but with a particular emphasis on migratory bicycles.
Water quality/smell: Lower pretty filthy, higher up OK.
Wildlife: Lots of herons, bird life in wooded stretches.

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